Tag: Panel B: “Character Creation”

Heredity and Generational Cyclity in One Hundred Years of Solitude

Presenter: Eva Bertoglio (Humanities)

Mentor: Matthew Sandler

Oral Presentation

Panel B: “Character Creation” Oak Room

Concurrent Session 1: 9:00-10:15am

Facilitator: Matt Nelson

The history of Colombia is fraught with conquest, myth, and patterns of oppression and revolution. Gabriel Garcia Marquez parallels the cycles of Colombian history in his magical realist novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude”. The patterns of incest, traits, failures, and names within the Buendia family are representative of the tension between genetic fate and choice that exists universally. Marquez uses repetition to make points about the nature of war, family, and the individual. Brian Conniff’s research on science and apocalypse in “One Hundred Years of Solitude” supports these ideas and makes connections in the text with the ideas of societal and scientific progress. The family cannot escape their tragic fate because they cannot break their own self-determined pattern of self destruction.

Chivalric Devotion and Feminized Power in Elizabethan Portraiture

Presenter: Maggie Witt (English, Art History)

Mentor: Louise Bishop

Oral Presentation

Panel B: “Character Creation” Oak Room

Concurrent Session 1: 9:00-10:15am

Facilitator: Matt Nelson

Art historians often write off Elizabethan art as a less advanced technical school that suffered from its severed contact with continental Europe after the 1530s. What so few of them stop to examine is the purposeful archaism embedded in the Elizabethan stylistic mode. Rather than attempting to emulate Italian Renaissance naturalism and dramatic shadows, Elizabeth I promoted during her reign an artistic style that reminded the viewer of England’s glorious chivalric past. By presenting herself as both a native English version of the Virgin Queen and the medieval mistress to whom all Elizabethan knights owed allegiance and devotion, Elizabeth reversed the active masculine iconography developed by her father, demonstrating visually the symbiosis of her position as woman and monarch. In this way, she not only reinforced her political might, but also recreated England medieval iconography in a secular rather than Catholic medium–reinforcing England’s independence from European religious influence while simultaneously stressing its artistic singularity. This study examines the commemorative and miniature portraits of Elizabeth I in their historical and artistic contexts in order to demonstrate their use of chivalric modes as visual legitimizations of female royal power.

Consequences of Conduct: A Character Analysis of Anna Karenina

Charlotte Rheingold (Comparative Literature, Economics)

Mentor: Susanna Lim

Oral Presentation

Panel B: “Character Creation” Oak Room

Concurrent Session 1: 9:00-10:15am

Facilitator: Matt Nelson

Although she is no role model to be emulated, readers have been enchanted by the character of Anna Karenina for generations. Her alluring personality and passionate individualism obscure her true nature— that of an adulteress who ultimately abandons her family. For Tolstoy, family represented the most sacred of relationships, yet he too is charmed by Anna despite her violation of his own ideal. How can one of literature’s most well-loved characters also be one of the most selfish and reckless? The answer lies in the fact that her personality abstracts her conduct and makes the reader willing to overlook her self-serving decisions. I will argue that Anna’s conduct is what ultimately leads to her downfall, and not her personality, because the same tendency to flout societal regulations is also seen in the morally upright character, Levin. I will reveal through a series of close readings and secondary sources that Anna’s faults lie in the nature of how she executes her decisions, not the decisions themselves, like having an affair, which Russian high society did not entirely frown upon.

Pocahottie” and the “Drunken Indian”: How Narrative Plots Create Danger for Native Americans

Presenters: Keaton Kell (International Studies, Romance Languages, Creative Writing)

Oral Presentation

Panel B: “Character Creation” Oak Room

Concurrent Session 1: 9:00-10:15am

Facilitator: Matt Nelson

The effects of narratives about Native Americans on the role of Native people and how they are viewed and how they view themselves in a modern world have remained relatively unexplored. An analysis of this role will allow us to better examine the violence and oppression faced by Native people in the United States as well as how and why that violence is perpetuated. By examining the representation of Native Americans in media, advertising, Native literature, and the news, I explore how narratives about Native people are created and how this effects both Native and non-people, which in many cases can be damaging and even dangerous to the Native people involved in these narratives. The importance of research on the connection between narratives created by a society and the results of these narratives on the minority they are about is clear. Understanding how people are effected by narratives about them sheds light not only on how we as a society can better protect minorities, but also on how we as a society can evolve past narratives in order to allow people to exist freely outside of those narratives.